What happened to the president's promises of diligence and accountability?

President Barack Obama gave an encouraging speech last year in which he vowed tighter restrictions on the United States' practice of drone warfare to avoid civilian casualties as much as possible, and to give the program greater transparency. If only the administration's actions matched the president's words.

Instead, what is supposed to be a more discriminate approach to killing enemies in the war on terror continues to claim apparently innocent lives. We're forced to say "apparently," because the administration has yet to give its side of the story on the latest drone strike to come under fire.

Our issue isn't with drones as an alternative to the far more devastating and costly waging of boots-on-the-ground war. The idea of selectively killing key terrorist leaders and operatives scattered over multiple countries makes sense.

But with the ability to wage this technological war comes an even greater expectation that America will do it honorably and with as much care as possible to avoid civilian deaths.

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A report by Human Rights Watch, "A Wedding That Became a Funeral: US Drone Attack on Marriage Procession in Yemen," paints a far messier picture of this strategy. According to the report, the Dec. 12 attack on a wedding convoy killed 12 people and wounded at least 15 others, including the bride. Witnesses and relatives say the casualties were civilians, contradicting unofficial U.S. and Yemeni claims that the dead were members of Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. Two people, including the target of the strike, are said to be on Yemen's "most-wanted terrorist" list; both escaped.

Even if terrorists had used the wedding as cover in violation of the laws of war, it would violate those same laws for the U.S. to attack knowing that it risked harming innocent human shields.

Human Rights Watch reasonably asks the U.S. to investigate and publish its findings. So far, however, the U.S. hasn't even officially acknowledged the strike.

Mr. Obama's silence is shameful. This was the president who accepted a Nobel Peace Prize that was given not for his actions but on the hope that he would follow through on his early lofty words and lead America out of a long period of war and into an era of greater cooperation and diplomacy.

This was the president who last year announced a new drone policy requiring "near-certainty" that no civilians would be harmed. Yet although drone strikes have declined since that speech in May, civilians, including children, continue to be killed or wounded.

And where, we have to wonder, is Congress, a body so consumed by the nonissues it investigates that it can't seem to be bothered with a genuinely serious one. If the administration won't follow through on its promise of greater accountability, the representatives of the American people should be asking: What exactly is being done, and who is being killed, in our name?